Personification  A form of metaphor in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things. Personification offers the writer a way to give the world life and motion by assigning familiar human behaviors and emotions to animals, inanimate objects, and abstract ideas. For example, in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the speaker refers to the urn as an "unravished bride of quietness." See also metaphor.


The definitions in this glossary were adapted from The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Sixth Edition, by Michael Meyer